A NEW SET OF INSTITUTIONS WILL REQUIRE A NEW LONG MARCH THROUGH THEM.

Fourth Turnings are supposed to be messy.  "Eventually, the values regime emerging from the wreckage of one major saecular crisis loses its ability to ameliorate discontents."  That post noted that the people who benefitted by the continuance of the values regime dedicated their energies to ... continuing the values regime.  "The continuation of the values regime of the Great Power Saeculum, or of the Long Twentieth Century has become a priority for the people in charge."

Richard "Belmont Club" Fernandez cautioned, a year before Dementia Joe handed the presidency to Donald Trump, that the discontinuities might be rough.

Every political scientist knows the theory that the US goes through a crisis roughly every 80 years or at least periodically. The year 1776 plus "fourscore and seven years" takes us to the civil war.  Eighteen sixty plus 80 takes us to WW2. WW2 plus 80 bring us to today, the current crisis.  There is nothing magic about this number; nor does it apply only to America. It's just that for some reason that is where its effects are most pronounced. It's three generations, the span of living memory. Institutions, culture and technological assumptions go out of scope.

If we are living through an inflection point, the likelihood the world is about to enter a discontinuity is high and we know relatively nothing about how it will turn out because our expectations are no longer a reliable guide. It is a maximum entropy moment until we "find" which way it is going to break, toward what attractor, what things now work. A word about maximum entropy.  It describes being in a new situation when you know nothing else about a situation than the possible outcomes, defined as 1/N for all possible N.

Leave aside the dubious mathematical verbiage, in which an inflection point (the second derivative changes sign) produces a discontinuity (differentiability implies continuity, the converse isn't true) and focus on the turnover of living memory.  "Sooner or later, though, grows up a generation who knew not Franklin or Adolf."  Combine that with guardians of the Established Order whose principal interest is in continuing that order, and buckle in.

The creation of a ‘rules-based liberal international order’ – in which all political contention would be managed by quasi-imperial supranational structures (such as the UN and EU) and war between states would become a relic of the barbaric past – was the pinnacle of post-war Western ambitions. Backed by the military power of the United States and its allies, this new international order would show zero tolerance for unauthorized conflict, depoliticizing the world and allowing open societies to flourish in peace.

The Long Twentieth Century has been characterized by these three interlinked post-war projects: the progressive opening of societies through the deconstruction of norms and borders, the consolidation of the managerial state, and the hegemony of the liberal international order. The hope was that together they could form the foundation for a world that would finally achieve peace on earth and goodwill between all mankind. That this would be a weak, passionless, undemocratic, intricately micromanaged world of technocratic rationalism was a sacrifice the post-war consensus was willing to make.

That dream didn’t work out, though, because the ‘strong gods’ refused to die.

That's part of the problem.  The "long march," though, is the consequence of the Consciousness Revolution.  Author N. S. Lyons misses that part of the saecular dynamics.

This masculine-inflected spirit was suppressed throughout the Long Twentieth Century, but now it’s back. And it wasn’t, she notes, ‘as though a proceduralist, managerial civilization affords no scope for horrors of its own’. Thus now ‘we’re watching in real time as figures such as the hero, the king, the warrior, and the pirate; or indeed various types of antihero, all make their return to the public sphere’.

Instead of producing a utopian world of peace and progress, the open society consensus and its soft, weak gods led to civilizational dissolution and despair. As intended, the strong gods of history were banished, religious traditions and moral norms debunked, communal bonds and loyalties weakened, distinctions and borders torn down, and the disciplines of self-governance surrendered to top-down technocratic management. Unsurprisingly, this led to nation-states and a broader civilization that lack the strength to hold themselves together, let alone defend against external threats from non-open, non-delusional societies. In short, the campaign of radical self-negation pursued by the post-war open society consensus functionally became a collective suicide pact by the liberal democracies of the Western world.

But, as reality began to intrude over the past two decades, the share of people still convinced by the hazy promises of the open society steadily diminished. A reaction began to brew, especially among those most divorced from and harmed by its aging obsessions: the young and the working class. The ‘populism’ that is now sweeping the West is best understood as a democratic insistence on the restoration and reintegration of respect for those strong gods capable of grounding, uniting and sustaining societies, including coherent national identities, cohesive natural loyalties, and the recognition of objective and transcendent truths.

Today’s populism is more than just a reaction against decades of elite betrayal and terrible governance (though it is that too); it is a deep, suppressed desire for long-delayed action, to break free from the smothering lethargy imposed by proceduralist managerialism and fight passionately for collective survival and self-interest. It is the return of the political to politics.

The values regime that brings an end to the saecular crisis is a values regime that emerged to bring an end to the saecular crisis.  If ending the saecular crisis means winning a war, there's going to be a lot of structure well suited to winning the war, but not necessarily well-suited to other challenges.

With all that churn in the national government, and with that diversity of triggering events each activating a different set of contrarians, the possibility of all those tumblers of gridlock falling in just the right way to make that magical implantation of a new values regime sees remote indeed.  There's a lengthy elaboration in the article, concluding with  "Beneath that static surface, elements were shifting, evolving, reassembling themselves, like a new consensus struggling to be born. You shouldn't expect the alliances of today to be the alliances of five years from now. And after another 20 years and who knows how many crises, who can say how the landscape will look?"  Perhaps there will be no consensus.

Twenty years after Victory, the victory babies we knew as the Baby Boomers chafed at the regimentation of the American High, and perhaps their parents, who knew not how to exist without all that structure, vicariously enjoyed their children throwing it off.  And thus, to use the Fourth Turning typology, the Consciousness Revolution gives way to an unraveling of everything, and that eventually exposes the weaknesses of the old values regime.  "Normals put up with the nanny state as long as its nannying was limited in scope and duration.  Thus the 55 mph speed limits after the 1974 oil embargo or the security theater after the airplane hijackings or even the financial bailouts after affordable housing proved to be a sham did not prompt the rebellion."  Then came the corona tyranny.  The lies are the problem.  And "the public is becoming accustomed to being lied to."

That brings us to our present.  "Just like that, 'government is force' hit everyone in the face, and 'the Wise Experts ... aren't' dawned on more than a few among us.  And that, dear reader, is the way saecular orders fracture."  Complete with Gramscian analysis.

Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist philosopher and political theorist, famously wrote in his Prison Notebooks, “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: Now is the time of monsters.”

This phrase speaks not only to Gramsci’s time, but to our own: when older sociopolitical and economic structures are collapsing, but no new stable order has yet emerged.

In such transitional moments, Gramsci argued, uncertainty, instability and reactionary forces dominate, creating a breeding ground for extremism, authoritarianism and political “monsters”—figures or movements that thrive in times of disorder.

That's Texas historian Steven Mintz, perhaps hoping to reassure his Inside Higher Ed followers that business as usual in higher education might be able to resume once the Orange Man goes away.  Unfortunately, when the saecular order fractures, the institutional flux might be epic.

For Gramsci, an interregnum refers to a period when the ruling class can no longer maintain its dominance, but the emerging class or system has not yet fully consolidated power. This results in a vacuum of authority, where competing forces—both progressive and regressive—struggle for control.

In these moments the legitimacy of the old order erodes, but its institutions continue to function in a dysfunctional, decaying manner. New movements and ideologies arise, but they lack coherence, structure or the ability to fully replace the old system. Meanwhile, monstrous forces emerge—authoritarian leaders, reactionary movements and political opportunists who capitalize on the instability.

Gramsci saw this dynamic playing out in early-20th-century Europe, where the decline of traditional aristocratic and capitalist structures, coupled with the failures of liberal democracy, gave rise to fascism and Stalinism. He viewed these as monsters—political mutations that emerged from the chaos of transition.

That the Anglosphere plus the Soviet Union won the War, which is to say brought an end to the saecular crisis of the early 1940s, sure left a lot of unfinished business for us, didn't it?  And thus, dear reader, Fourth Turnings are messy.

History is not a linear progression but a series of cycles, punctuated by moments of collapse and renewal. When dominant political, economic and ideological structures break down, they rarely give way immediately to a new, stable order.

Instead, the period between the death of the old system and the emergence of the new is often chaotic, violent and unpredictable. When great empires, ruling ideologies or geopolitical structures collapse, they leave behind a vacuum. This vacuum is rarely filled by a single force but instead becomes a battleground of competing factions, ideologies and power struggles. Only through conflict, negotiation and time does a new order finally emerge.

Emphasis, please, on that emerge.  And emergence can be messy.

Like past historical interregnums, our world today is trapped in an unstable and dangerous limbo.

The post–World War II order, which was largely defined by the Cold War’s bipolar structure, has now been gone for over three decades, but a stable replacement has yet to emerge. The unipolar world dominated by the United States after 1991 has weakened.

We are witnessing the decline of U.S. hegemony, the rise of new powers like China and the fragmentation of global politics into multiple competing spheres of influence. In the midst of this transition, we are already seeing conflict, chaos and the resurgence of political forces that many had assumed had been relegated to the past.

A new world order will eventually arise, but the crucial question remains: At what cost? If history is any guide, the period before the emergence of a new stable order is likely to be marked by war, social upheaval, economic instability and political extremism. The world we recognize today may be unrecognizable within a generation.

Yes, that's exactly the Fourth Turning.  What comes out of the resolution, whatever it is, however it is achieved, will be a values regime that emerged to close out the saecular crisis of the moment.  There will be institutions, there will be unresolved conflicts, and there will be future awakening eras with new long marches through those institutions to follow.  Buckle in.